Category: yahoo

We're hiring for the YDN Bangalore team

In addition to the Yahoo! Developer Network team at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, California, we also have a small team of developers in our Bangalore, India office who work with us on our core projects. I visited Bangalore in April for their Hack Day before I was directly involved with YDN, and I was really impressed with the talent and creativity in the office there, so when I joined YDN, I was looking forward to working with the team there more closely on “real” YDN projects (though being Hack Day maestro was fun, too).

Right now, we have an open position on the Bangalore team. Here’s the semi-official job description:

Yahoo! R&D, Bangalore is looking for a strong senior engineer/lead engineer for its team that works for Yahoo! Developer Network (http://developer.yahoo.com/). Opportunities and challenges include designing, building and evolving products in the emerging areas of web services and web platforms. Technical requirements for the job include C++, Unix and/or web services/XML skills. Also important are: innovative mindset, ability to learn quickly and desire to work in the fast-paced Internet industry. Experience in building highly-scalable high-performance systems is a big plus.

If you live in Bangalore and are interested in working with us, please send your resume to me at my Yahoo! address (chadd@yahoo-inc.com) and tell me why you want to work for YDN (I will forward them on to Pankaj, our hiring manager there). Note (and I hate to say this but past experiences suggests that I have to): any resumes from staffing agencies for this position (or any others) will be ignored, so please don’t take my post here as an open invitation to send me resumes. I want to interact directly with the candidates without professional intermediaries. Of course, I will gladly accept referrals from other developers in Bangalore for their friends, especially from people I met on my visit there.

Also, if you want to have a look around the office, a search for “yahoo bangalore” on Flickr turns up almost 2,000 photos, including some I took during my visit in April.

IBM does Hack Day

I was pleased to see that the folks over at IBM recently ran their own Hack Day modeled on the ones we’ve been doing at Yahoo! (which had its own inspirations, of course). IBM is still one of the giants of American business — #10 on the Fortune 500 list — so this is significant.

Kelly Drahzal reports on what happened. Be sure to check out the Hack Day participant map and more on how they are handling their presentations. From what I can tell on Kelly’s blog, she totally nailed the spirit: Looking forward to seeing where this goes next, but my message is … Just DO it. Nice work, Kelly and IBM.

I’m just back from vacation so I don’t have time to write much more now, but in the quiet U.S. holiday period last week while most folks in the states were kicking back on the beach or enjoying backyard BBQs, Yahoo! had two more large-scale Hack Days: one in London for the entire EU (which exceeded all expectations. . . I was in London to see the presentations from all over the European continent) and a second in Bangalore, India. Amazing stuff.

A new role for me: Yahoo! Developer Network

Now that Bradley has mentioned it and Jeremy alluded to it, it’s time for me to write it here. As of this week, I’m leading the Yahoo! Developer Network and Jeremy has joined the team that sprung from the team he helped build originally.

I’m too busy diving in to the new role to write much about it. I would say the usual “I’m looking forward to it,” but I’m already immersed. A big thanks to both Toni Schneider and Jeffrey McManus for everything they both did to make YDN what it is today. I’m really excited about the team, too. I had a nice sushi outing with everyone (Dan, Eleanor, Jason, Vernon, Kent, and Jeremy) just today at Seto — highly recommended (both lunch with the YDN team and the restaurant).

Yahoo! Hack Day: wow again

Our Hack Day on Friday once again left me in awe of the hackers at Yahoo! In sheer quantity of hacks, we exceeded all prior Hack Days, and the quality seemed to be higher than ever. Our panel of judges included some of the top executives in the company and even one of our co-founders (David Filo). Mike Arrington at TechCrunch was there and has a great summary. I’m really pleased that we were able to arrange for Mike to join us — it was gratifying to get his outside perspective on what we’ve been doing.

Yahoo! Hack DayI had a few final thoughts based on various comments I’ve been reading around the web, hearing from co-workers, etc. Before I get to those, I want to make very clear that this is a “we” thing. I’ve been organizing the Hack Days since our first one in December, but it’s always been a broad effort across all levels at Yahoo! I’ve had different people jump in to help make it happen each time, whether it’s a product manager going to pick up trophies or a PR person coordinating food delivery. For each Hack Day, I’ve had enthusiastic support from the top levels of the company. Of course, the hacker turnout and effort is what really makes it all successful, so the biggest kudos go to them.

First, at least based on what I’m aware of, I think what we’ve been doing structurally with Hack Day is unique among large companies like Yahoo! We did our first large-scale Hack Day back in December with hundreds of participants and it’s only grown from there. While we were certainly inspired by startups (which I pointed out in my prior post), pulling off a Hack Day for hundreds and thousands of engineers across several offices and sometimes even different countries in a 10-year-old company is a different sort of organizational hack. Even Microsoft with its 60,000+ employees put together a Hack Day with only 75 participants and in a very specific business unit, which suggests to me that size doesn’t make it any easier. The fact that we have been able to pull off such a large-scale event across Yahoo! is a not only an indication of the enormous energy of our developers, it’s a testament to the strength, vision, and support of our upper management (one of my favorite photos from the day is the look of pure joy on our CFO Sue Decker’s face in this photo I took from the podium). Of course, I’d like to know if I’m missing some examples out there of large-scale Hack Days or similar events — anyone know of any? (Just to get it out of the way, I think this is a different approach than the Google 20% initiative, a program that has its its own imperfections.)

Yahoo! Hack DaySecond, I think the overall looseness of our Hack Day is unique and very intentional, but ultimately difficult to pull off the larger a company is, which makes what we’re doing at Yahoo! all the more remarkable. Companies of all types are naturally very goal-oriented and there is always the temptation to create constraints on activity to nudge that activity in a very specific direction to meet some sort of short-term need or goal. There’s no denying that Hack Day has immediate positive business implications for Yahoo! but the constraints are few and are only put in place to prevent completely unproductive anarchy. If you think this is easy, it’s not. There’s always the temptation to form committees, add more rules, and create a more heavyweight process. We’ve avoided that so far (again, a testament to both our engineers and upper management).

Another positive outcome of Hack Day is the spontaneous emergence of people from within the organization. There are lots of stars at Yahoo! but the company is large enough that you might not meet some of them. Also, some hackers are shy and hesitant to show some of the personal stuff they’ve been working on, but the shyness seems to melt away on Hack Day. Since hierarchy is completely meaningless on Hack Day, it’s all about how cool your hack is, not the org chart. On this Hack Day, I met Dave Glass, a self-described “6 foot, bald, tattooed biker that just happens to be an extreme geek.” Dave won an award for his hack and blogged about it. Dave has only been at Yahoo! for a few weeks and just moved to California. How many people get to stand up in front of hundreds of co-workers in their first few weeks — not just other hackers but top company execs — and show their stuff? That’s magic. (We also had a few interns show their hacks as well — see this comment from intern Richard Crowley on TechCrunch).

The large-scale Hack Day model isn’t perfect by any means and needs to be tweaked in a million different ways, but it’s a functioning organism of its own at this point. Out of all the things that I’ve been involved in during my career, I have to say that I’m proudest of my contributions in getting Hack Day off the ground.

Commentary around the web: Jeremy Zawodny, Dav Glass, Michelle Hedstrom, Gordon Luk

P.S. a note on the awards

Here’s the complete list (and as Mike Arrington noted on TechCrunch, the awards were not the primary incentive):

Best Overall: Swati Raju, Dan Rose, and Peter Anick

Best User Experience: Deepa Joshi, Paul Yiu, Cecil Balzen

Most Money: Aaron Stein, Joshua Rangsikitpho, Sumit Chachra, Steve Spencer, Cody Simms, Dave Zito, Yu Shan Chuang

The “Why Did You Wait for Hack Day?” award: (a tie)
#1: Shankar Venkataraman, Subodh Shakya
#2: Gordon Luk, Mirek Grymuza, Vince Maniago

Best Use of APIs: Dave Glass

Most Unexpected: Rahul Nair

People’s Choice: Mega Hack Team (Leonard Lin, Gordon Luk, Edward Ho, Kevin Cheng, Daniel Raffel, Cameron Marlow, Jonathan Trevor)

Yahoo! Hack Day tomorrow, and some of my inspirations

Tomorrow at noon, we kick off our fourth Hack Day at Yahoo! It runs from noon tomorrow until noon Friday, followed by demos Friday afternoon and a party. As I write this, I am fielding questions from Yahoo hackers who are planning to stay here all night tomorrow night putting together their hacks. Awesome.

We’ve now had two (1, 2) in Santa Clara and one in Bangalore. Hack Day #5 happens in Bangalore on July 4th, followed closely by the pan-European EU Hack Day in London on July 6th. This thing has serious legs around Yahoo! Terry Semel and Jerry Yang presented Hack Day awards personally in Bangalore (see the Flickr photo — there are close to 200 photos tagged hackday on Flickr now — expect more this week). During the Friday demos, C-level execs will be mixing it up with the hackers (we’ve had wonderfully enthusiastic support from the top!)

Hack Day at Yahoo! has minimal rules:Tools for Yahoo! Hack Day

  • Take something from idea to prototype in a day
  • Demo it at the end of the day, in two minutes or less (usually less)

Sounds simple (and it is), but like all simple things, a lot of thought went into making it so simple. Most of my time the past few months has been spent keeping Hack Day relatively “pure.” What do I mean by “pure”? Well, it would be very easy to make such an event a “rah rah” corporate exercise with all sorts of interests trying to mold the event to some very specific business end, but that doesn’t happen. Hack Day is by hackers, for hackers. The ideas are theirs, the teams are self-determined, and no technologies are proscribed. I don’t even know what people are building until they get up to do their demos at the end of the day.

Looking towards Hack Day tomorrow, I wanted to point out a few of the inspirations that inspired those simple organizing principles (to paraphrase the famous Newton quote, we’re definitely standing on the shoulders of giants):

These are just inspirations, of course. I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve learned getting this off the ground initially and putting it together for a multi-national public company with several thousand employees. It would fill a book that I don’t have the time to write right now.

In the end, Yahoo! hackers really make the whole thing happen, though — I just help create the context. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens tomorrow. I have no idea what will emerge, just that it will be cool and I’ll have a big smile on my face.

Yahoo! Bangalore Hack Day: a report

To put it mildly, the Yahoo! Bangalore Hack Day completely rocked. There were so many hacks at the end of the day that we had to run demos in two separate rooms simultaneously. I had an amazing time and was incredibly impressed with the energy and creativity of everyone I met. Some of the most talented hackers I have ever met are at Yahoo! Bangalore. (The free buffet Indian lunch was awesome, too.)

Here are some links to first-person accounts from Bangalore hackers:

The essence of hacking. . . and some Flickr photos by tag: bangalorehackday (with some post-Hack Day pub action)

I’m impressed that the Bangalore team one-upped us back at Yahoo! U.S. — they started their Hack Day promptly at midnight, with thirty-five hackers hunkering down for the long haul. Even more impressive, the core of that late-night group managed to take me out for dinner and beers the night after Hack Day. Their energy after having been up working for days was remarkable in comparison to my mild lethargy from a little jetlag (I arrived the day before Hack Day after 30 hours in transit and 10,000 miles in the air). Consider me impressed with their party skills as well, especially in a city that closes up pretty early.

Before closing this post, I wanted to thank those hackers explicitly. Sumeet, aka the famed “Teemus”, glad you finally got some sleep and it was good seeing you the next day at BarCamp Bangalore. Premshree, thanks for delaying your flight to hang out, and I’m glad you made it to Bombay. Gopal V, thanks for hanging out with us even though you hadn’t slept in days. Pankaj, thanks for keeping me laughing all the night. Hitesh, thanks for coming out after a long day of hacking. Finally, Kapil, glad you enjoyed the chicken. 😉

You guys are truly awesome hackers.

Going to Bangalore and London

Next Tuesday, I’m headed to Bangalore to visit the Yahoo! office there for their Hack Day (we had one last December and one in March at the main Yahoo! offices in California). Even better, Yahoo! Bangalore’s Hack Day on Friday is followed by Bangalore BarCamp on Saturday. I signed up to talk about what we’re doing with Hack Day at Yahoo! but I’m more interested in hearing about what the hackers in Bangalore are doing.

I’ve never been to India, so I’m really excited about the trip, even though it will be short (four days). On the way back, I’m stopping in London for three days to visit some of my Yahoo! colleagues. The schedule is looking really busy, but if anyone out there in Bangalore or London wants to get together, send me an email (you can find it on my main blog page).

The Onion at Yahoo: Peter Koechley

The Onion and Web 2.0Today, I brought in Peter Koechley, managing editor of The Onion, for the weekly speaker series I run at Yahoo!

I love the Onion, and Peter’s talk did not disappoint. He took us through some of his favorite Onion headlines of the past, read some of the headlines he had written that didn’t ultimately make it (some of which were really good), surfaced a few actual reader letters (which were totally absurd), and talked about how The Onion is put together, both in print and online.

I loved the slide pictured at right, which read:

The Onion is not a Web 2.0 company: we despise our users.

Besides despising users, Peter offered further evidence that The Onion is not a Web 2.0 company: “You guys haven’t acquired us yet.”

Blown away (again) by Hack Day

I organized the second Hack Day at Yahoo! this past Friday, and it was extraordinary (check out some of the Flickr photos tagged “hackday”). Rather than write a long post with my own analysis, I’ll leave it up to some of the participants (it was extraordinary because of them anyway — I just try to lend minimal order to the beautiful chaos of it all):

Ed Ho, “Hack Day 2 at Yahoo!”:

Today is one of those days that makes me proud to be a Yahoo. The sheer number of hacks was overwhelming (again) and the quality of each improved as well. What I saw today was nothing more or less than I knew was possible when I joined Yahoo!. Yahoo! has an incredible number of smart programmers, and they are full of ideas and energy. The spirit had even captured our offices around the world and we had multiple hackers in other countries who had stayed late into the night (past midnight their time) just to have the chance to demo their developments to the rest of the Yahoo world. It was magnificent.

It was clear this time around that people had been thinking long and hard about their ideas and they were ready to execute. It’s personally satisfying to see programmers execute on such innovative ideas without PRD’s, MRD’s, Functional Specs and those obsolete remnants of waterfall development cycles. Powerful wizardry was going on at Yahoo today and I’m happy.

Matt McAlister, “Top 10 Reasons why Hack Day rocks”:

How do you explain the benefit of Hack Day in one sentence? Hack Day bubbles up significant yet tangible product strategy advances from across the organization while simultaneously feeding all that workforce optimization and touchy feely crap without paying a team of expensive Stephen Covey robots to tell you what you already know. It’s also super cheap.

Be sure to read the rest of Matt’s post — it’s good stuff about what real hands-on innovation means. (I have always absolutely hated the usual corporate team-building activities. I was always the one quietly scowling in the background as my co-workers role-played irrelevant situations while a professional “facilitator” asked me if I was having “fun.” Hack Day is very intentionally the antidote to that sort of pointless corporate activity. Bonus link on this topic: Douglas Rushkoff’s Fun AT work vs. Fun AS work.)

David Beach, “More on Yahoo! Hack Day 2”:

It was a huge success. There were so many hacks. Way more than last time. The quality and thinking behind the hacks was also improved. This tells me the initiative is working. People see the value of this and are taking advantage of the opportunity to express themselves in this manner. I believe that it’s one of the best things Yahoo! has done. At least internally.

The room was packed. I don’t think I can discuss specific hacks, but there were very clever innovations presented. I believe there were many more search hacks this time. Upcoming, Y! Widgets, Flickr, Autos, Shopping, 360, Local, Travel, WebJay, Maps, Messenger, Mail, and more were all represented and hacked in one form or another. I’m sure you’ll be seeing many of them appear live on the site in the near future. Actually it would be cool to somehow identify the new feature or service as something that was developed through Hack Day when it goes live. At the very least the orgs respective blog should blab about it.

I don’t know when the next one will be, but I’m preparing. I said earlier that I’m going to learn to program and I meant it. I taught myself pretty much everything I know this far, so why should I stop now? I’m starting with Ruby on Rails, because I hear it’s elegant and simple, plus I believe I can understand object oriented structured. I’m also going to brush up on web standards, CSS, and XHTML. It’s been awhile and much has changed since I every seriously had my hands on the stuff behind the page. First I believe that this is the only way to get some of my ideas out there, and second, I fit in with nutty programmers and designers more than I do with PMs. I’ve done the design thing, so now I’m going to try the other side. We’ll see how that works. L8r

(You go, Beach!)

JR Conlin, “Past our prime? Bullshit.”:

Had to get out of the Hack Day Presentation show. It was a packed room, with nearly 100 hacks being presented. This is stuff whipped up in a day, folks. Viable products that seriously kick ass. Add in the 70 or so from the one last quarter and… well… anyone who thinks we’ve got a bunch of lazy dinosaurs working here needs to have their head examined.

Seriously. Cool. Stuff.

(Hopefully a bunch will be ready to roll out soon.)

The coolest thing about Hack Day is that it goes far beyond one day — the kind of inspired development that is showcased on Hack Day is happening every day now (Take it from me — I stay extremely busy curating just a fraction of it). Hack Day is a day for the celebration of hackerdom, a tip of the hat to the artists among us who express themselves in code, a recognition of the pure joys of creation. Yes, hackers are artists. As I wrote in one of my old InfoWorld columns: ” If art is making order out of chaos, then software developers are artists at the highest level.”

Something very special is going on at Yahoo! and I’m absolutely giddy that I have something to do with it. It’s a lot of fun being continually amazed.

Update: Found an interesting article in the Sunday NYT: “Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas.” That’s the spirit of Hack Day. Key quote from the article:

According to Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, the computer book publisher, and an evangelist for open source technologies, creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling “architecture of participation.” That is, which companies make it easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products?

Yep.